Friday of the
Fourth Week in Lent
(Wisdom 2:1a.12-22; John 7:1-2.10.25-30)
In their quest to understand others, people say things
like that they “know where the person is coming from.” They mean that the person’s different way of thinking
can be attributed to her cultural background.
In today’s gospel the Jerusalemites think that they have Jesus figured out
because he comes from Galilee.
Jesus, however, has other origins besides his Galilean
upbringing. He was sent by God to
accomplish the work of human redemption.
This truth will not be patent until he rises from the dead, but his
followers perceive it now. Yet God is always acting behind the scene as
it were. The passage implies that God
prohibits the authorities from arresting Jesus because, as it reads, “his hour
had not yet come.”
We may feel tempted to see Jesus as another human
being. We may want to say that he
garnered stories of field and fishing through his experiences in Galilee. We may credit him with heroic virtue because
of an unusually strong mother. And then
we may fall in line with modernists who deny Jesus’ divinity. If we are to maintain our Christian identity,
we must resist the temptation. The Church
stakes everything on Jesus’ divine nature.
It prompted him to sacrifice all for human redemption, and it assured
him of an eternal destiny. This nature has
been bestowed on us, not by birth but by the grace of Baptism.
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